"We have seen
through the fancy dress of modern capitalism": David
Widgery

Firework displays have the power to illuminate, shock and
delight. Our heads are constantly turning to catch the next flare-up. David
Widgery was a walking November the Fifth. He could not and would not be tied
down to a one-track life. For a generation of London's East-Enders he was
"Doc", the GP at the end of hours in the waiting room or the GP who
belted round the housing estates of Tower Hamlets. But he was also the spirit
that raged at the evidence that the diseases he was diagnosing were really
cankers growing out of lousy housing, hazardous work and lack of money.

His brilliant and last book Some Lives! (1991)
charts the excruciating cases and conditions on his rounds, but in typical
outbursts of wit and learning interleaves these with a political walk-round the
East End.

I first saw him on the platform at the London School of
Economics in 1968, doing what he always did, firing off disparate examples of
the iniquities of capitalism, matched by stirring, but equally disparate
instances of resistance. He could zoom through rack-renting in Liverpool 9, or
murder in Ian Smith's Salisbury, and a moment later remind us of students on
the Streets of Berlin or striking night cleaners in London W1. "We have
seen through the fancy dress of modern capitalism," he said, "and
found the irrational violence and the hopelessness at its core" - and that
was a medical student talking. We nodded, looking at his cropped hair.

But this was the same Widgery who could recite André
Breton's Surrealist manifesto; who wrote articles on "Fleet Street's Chain
of Fools" on psychedelic paper in Oz, which he was later to
edit; and who fell for Allen Ginsberg. In his fighting collection of 20 years
of newspaper articles, Preserving Disorder (1989), he says,
"I'm glad I heard Hendrix live, but gladder to have marched with the
dockers to the gates of Pentonville Prison." He was also glad to have done
the same against bombs, for miners against Gulf wars and for hospitals.

For some, the Widgery cocktail was a bit too heady. The
organisation he devoted himself to all his adult life, the International
Socialists - later to turn itself into the Socialist Workers Party- did not
always see how his personal liberationist stand - with its shades of Rimbaud,
Shelley and R.D. Laing - slotted into Leninism. But, as he wrote in 1989,
"Without '68 and the SWP I would, no doubt, in the conventional manner of
the educationally upwardly mobile, be ensconced in the Department of Community
Medicine of a cathedral town with my children down for public school and a sub
to the SDP." "Nor", he adds, "am I prone to the depression
which seems near-terminal among so many socialist intellectuals now becalmed in
sophisticated nihilism."

The flip-side saw him delighted that he had irritated Julie
Burchill with the book Beating Time (1986), his fizzing
collage-account of the Rock Against Racism movement of the late Seventies. He
rooted for the rebels of rock, Seeing in a Peter Tosh or an Elvis Costello a
glorious popular shout for change. He gobbled up fiction, history, politics,
theatre, cabaret, music and poetry and then would surprise us with a new
enthusiasm - his hero in the lndependent magazine's "Heroes
and Villains" column turned out not to be Trotsky, Bessie Smith or Lenny
Bruce - all in his pantheon - but the free-verse American poet William Carlos
Williams.

In our collaboration on The Chatto Book of
Dissent (1991), we spent many hours choosing past heroes - people who
burst out of their shackles and opposed the ways and means of the powerful. He
wanted to be one of them, with them. I like to think he would have rushed round
to my house on a Sunday morning with this obituary, marked with his illegible
black squiggles, saying, "We can't leave out Widgery." We won't.

He is survived by his partner Juliet Ash and their daughter,
Annie. Another daughter, Molly, died soon after birth nine years ago.

Michael Rosen

David John Turner Widgery, writer, journalist, doctor
and activist, born 27th April 1947, died London 26 October 1992